Intel seems to be pushing hard into the flash memory market now that we have confirmation that it intends to release new solid-state drives (SSD) for use in laptops. Not only that, but the company will be the biggest available on the market with 80GB and 160GB models.

No official confirmation of a release date was forthcoming, but the spokesperson for Intel said the drives would appear in the 2nd quarter of 2008. This fits with an earlier comment in January from another Intel spokesperson, which said that the Intel Developer Forum on April 2-3 would be used to demo the drives. Could that be the launch event?

The new SSDs will come in 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch sizes, which I assume accounts for the 80GB and 160GB storage models. What is also unclear is whether the new drives will take advantage of the recent collaboration between Intel and Micron, which saw the development of new NAND flash memory technology, which is 5x faster than standard NAND.

I’ve said many times before the two limiting factors in the uptake of SSD by consumers are price and amount of storage. If 160GB drives are about to arrive on the market, then that solves one of the limits and then companies just need to work on the price.

If Intel has managed to not only get a 160GB drive to market, but also take advantage of extra fast memory through the Micron collaboration, I will be very impressed. Given how young the SSD market is, a number of companies could step in with better technology and dominate right now.

I believe the Intel Developer Forum will see the final unveiling of the new drives and signal Intel’s intent to become a major player in the SSD market.

Reader Comments

ee92

Cost being a major issue, that is why semiconductor companies like Intel, Samsung, and Toshiba are all pushing into this market.

They all own their very own semiconductor factories and don't have to buy their flash parts from a 3rd party. To them SSD's are THE PERFECT delivery vehicles for more of their flash parts. Even better then cell phones and digital cameras because of the HUGE quantities of flash parts involed in making a decen sized SSD.

SSD's are the wave of the future. And the big flash manufacturers maybe displacing some of the traditional disk drive companies at the top of that heap.

I work for a network storage company and we are already assigning folks to start looking at the SSD market. It's being labeled as a "disruptive technology" which means it may change the entire nature of our business.

SSD's are going to happen, they are going to introduce the concept of tiered storage to the consumer drive market. A concept that has been in the enterprise storage market for a decade (aka large data centers). Tiered storage means the storage you access more often is smaller and quicker, while the storage you access less often is slower and cheaper.

In a PC or laptop this means your applications reside in your 1st tier storage (an SSD), which runs screaming fast, and your big data files (pics, video, word documents, etc, etc) would be in your 2nd/3rd tier storage (magnetic disk drives). So you boot your OS in milliseconds, run your application in a few more milliseconds, then periodically update your magnetic hard drive. A hard drive that is a major consumer of power in a laptop. By using it a fraction of the time laptop battery time can be extended by many hours. Combine that with an OLED display in a few more years an better lithium batteries and in the early 1/2 of the next decde zero boot time laptops will be able to run for days.

This is a disruptive technology that is absolutely going to happen.

fdc

A lot of people want SSDs to happen, but the negative impact on revenue (reported recently by Intel) is a challenge brought on precisely by cost reduction.